Jackie Fox grew up with a guitar in her hand. In 1975, when she was 15 years old, she was pulled off the dance floor at a Hollywood nightclub and recruited to join an all-girl teen rock band. The Runaways became a sensation and tossed Fox and her young bandmates into a turbulent industry that was also violent and sexist. In 1977, Fox quit the band. She never played music professionally again.
Now, almost 50 years later, Fox has recast her experience in the form of a board game. In Rock Hard: 1977, Fox has shrunk the chaotic ’70s club scene to the size of a card table. She has written her own rules, anointed new kinds of rock stars and assumed control. Now she can play on her own terms — and win.
“As soon as I decided I was going to design a game, I knew it was going to be about becoming a rock star,” Fox, 64, said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home earlier this week. “People have been asking me to ‘tell my story,’ and there are a lot of reasons why I don’t want to sit down and write a book.” After all the years she has spent living and reliving that experience, she wanted to reimagine it — to create a situation where she could have fun.
In the game, you play one of 10 characters who are, much like Fox was, musicians on the verge of stardom in 1977. (They each have excellent hair.) As you roll the dice and pull cards, your rock hopeful hops around a board from day job to rehearsal studio, vying to achieve personal goals while growing your reputation and writing songs. Points are tallied on a board styled like an amp that turns up to 11.
As your avatar works her way up from bar mitzvahs to arena stages, you navigate managers, journalists, D.J.s and fans. The game’s protagonists are largely not the white men who dominated the rock scene in the 1970s, but characters representing the diverse musicians who played in clubs and toiled in studios, angling for their shot. You can play as Yolanda Delacroix, an Afro-Cuban studio musician, or “Doc” Sapphire, the androgynous child of Indian immigrants, and the game play is tuned slightly to reflect their experiences.
Matt Hyland, the managing director of DevirGames, said that he fished Fox’s cold pitch for Rock Hard out of a customer service email inbox. Many of the games the company makes are quite serious strategy games, but this one actually looked fun. Hyland called from the floor of Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North America, just after the game was loosed on the crowd ahead of its planned Aug. 7 release. “They’re going crazy,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In “Rock Hard,” you might pull a card where someone calls you a derogatory term, and you have to decide whether to fight them. You might end up at a frat party full of leering, jeering drunk guys that sets you seriously off your game. Drugs are recast as “candy,” which can hurt you if you’re not careful. But despite the potential pitfalls, the game is designed to raze the music industry into an even playing field, to reimagine the scene as a playground where a girl like Fox can scale to the top. “I wanted to have a hint of that, without really exploring the darker side of it,” Fox said. “There was a darker side.”
As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Fox — born Jackie Fuchs — played guitar, surfed and overachieved. High school bored her; she imagined graduating early and studying mathematics at U.C.L.A. One night she was plucked from the Starwood nightclub by the Los Angeles scene maker Rodney Bingenheimer and introduced to Kim Fowley, a producer who recruited her into the all-girl band he was assembling, which had grown to include Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford and Sandy West. Fowley handed Fox a bass guitar and a new last name. The band was subject to Fowley’s whims and dangerously objectified by the larger culture of the scene. In an infamous feature in Crawdaddy magazine, the reporter imagined masturbating while watching the girls play.
In 2015, after Fowley died, Fox told the full story of her experience in the band for the first time, to Jason Cherkis, an investigative reporter at HuffPost. She said in the early morning of Jan. 1, 1976, she was drugged with quaaludes after a show, and Fowley raped her in front of a crowd backstage as other members of the band watched. (Jett denied she was present; Currie told Cherkis that she spoke up in the moment and left the room.) Fox quit the band the next year.
It was decades later that she began to confront the abuse and speak to other women in the room about what happened. Going public was not exactly healing; after the story’s publication, she has said she “woke up in a parallel universe.” But it was worth it to help other women in music. “I know that I am a part, however small, of the lead up to the #MeToo movement,” she said.
After quitting the Runaways, Fox hoped to become a manager, to advocate for artists behind the scenes. “I wanted to stay in the music industry because I just love music that much,” she said. But outside the glow of stardom, she still faced harassment.
She finally did go to U.C.L.A., where she majored in linguistics and Italian, and then earned a J.D. from Harvard’s law school, where she was classmates with Barack Obama. She become an entertainment lawyer, and eventually wound her way back to music, negotiating song rights in films.
In 2018, she went on “Jeopardy!” and won four times. It wasn’t until her third game that she revealed that she had been in the Runaways. “I didn’t want that to define me,” she recalled.
About 10 years ago, around the time she started to speak out about Fowley, Fox joined a board game group in Los Angeles, and a few years later, she started designing a game of her own. During the Covid shutdowns of 2020, she played a prototype of Rock Hard alone hundreds of times, embodying every character, seeing the game from every angle.
The work helped her discover new angles on her own life, too. Fox spent a lot of time puzzling out how candy ought to work in the game; she was always sober on the road, and her version of “candy” is really candy — chocolate peanut butter cups. “Because I don’t have that thing, I have spent five years really trying to understand it,” she said of addiction. “I’ve spent even more time trying to understand how somebody watches a sexual assault in progress and does nothing to stop it. And I think I do understand that now.”
Amanda Wong, who streams about board games on Twitch as Panda8ngel, joined Fox’s board game group in 2019, and was struck by her clever strategies. She had no idea Fox had been a rock star until she invited her on her stream and learned about it live on air. “She really put the ’70s in the game,” Wong said. As she played it with Fox, she realized that many of the event cards hid a tangled back story from Fox’s own life. One of the game’s venues, Panda Palace, is named for Wong.
Fox described board games as “a callback to happy times in childhood.” Her own was cut short, and the game has given her the opportunity to access the heady joys of becoming a famous and pioneering rock musician as a teenage girl. “There’s bad blood within the Runaways,” Fox acknowledged, but “I don’t want to live in that space.” Before it all fell apart, “I had fun with every single person who was in the band.”
On Thursday, Fox called again, this time from Gen Con at the Indiana Convention Center, where DevirGames had erected a mock stage to promote Rock Hard. By the time she hit the floor that morning, she had already sold out of the 600 units Devir had marked for the show, and now a crowd of fans was waiting for Fox to autograph them. “It reminds me of being in a band,” she said. “The fans are nicer. They wait quietly in line.”
Later she sent a picture of a special player card I had not seen before: In a Rock Hard expansion pack, you can play as Jackie Fox herself. “Born in Los Angeles, California, Jackie was a bold and studious child, interested in many things and unwilling to be limited by her gender,” the character’s bio says. “A natural-born lawyer, Jackie enjoys learning and following rules, but she also likes looking for the loopholes.” She can play the game over and over until she wins.
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